Night Crossing

Frogger, rebuilt around a night crossing, and then rebuilt again around the thing the original never had: somebody coming up behind you. The bands are still the bands — traffic you time rather than fight, water you can only cross by riding what is already moving on it, solid ground in between — but the board is no longer one screen you play five times. Every crossing is its own route: a map taller than the glass, generated fresh, scrolling up as you climb it. You are reading ground you have never seen, and the fence at the top is out of sight until you get near it.

What is behind you is the sweep: a line of headlights working its way up the route, edge to edge, with no sideways past it. It does not stop and it does not slow down, so standing still is now a decision that costs you ground. And the score does not reset when a route does — every row you cover is twelve metres, added up over the whole journey, so the board is a ladder of how far somebody got rather than of how long they lasted.

The verges between the bands are where the rest of it lives: coils of razor wire and panels of fence that refuse a hop and cost you the seconds to go round, foot patrols and K-9 units working their way along a row with a torch and a dog on a lead, and — deeper in — a crosshair that crosses the map towards you and only fills while you are standing still. Any one verge has at most one of them on it. A row with a light, a guard and a coil across the middle is not three hazards, it is a shut row.

The person on the screen is a person, and nothing on this board is a monster; the sweep is lights and engines, the guards are doing a job, and every way a run can end is a way a night can go wrong — the road, the current, the jug running dry, a light that stayed on you a second too long, a dog at the end of its lead, a scope that settled, the lights behind you catching up. Everything here turns you back down the map; nothing here kills anybody. There is a shelf of records under the cabinet and four phonk loops of its own underneath that.

How it goes#

• One hop at a time. `↑` `←` `↓` `→` or `W` `A` `S` `D` move you exactly one square. On a phone, swipe for a hop and tap for a hop forward — a swipe held and dragged keeps hopping, so two tiles' worth of thumb is two hops. There is no other button: everything you pick up fires the moment you touch it.
• Nothing can touch you while a hop is in the air — except the sweep. You are checked where you land and never in between, which is what makes the water readable: a hop that passes over open river between two floats is a hop, not a drowning. The sweep is the exception on purpose, because mid-air immunity is a promise about things you are jumping over and there is nothing to jump over behind you.
• The route is new every time and you cannot see the end of it. Fourteen rows on the first crossing, up to forty-four deep in, laid out fresh each time: bands of road and bands of water, two to four rows each, with a solid verge closing every one. That verge is not decoration — it is what guarantees the row you step onto water from and the row you leave it by are both somewhere you can stand.
• The sweep is the clock. It starts three rows below you and covers the whole route in a fixed time that gets shorter on every crossing — a bit over half a minute at the start, under nine seconds by route twenty. Being caught turns you back. Everything else on this cabinet tops out somewhere; this does not, so there is a route where the night is shorter than the walk no matter how well you are playing.
• The right-hand margin is the map of the map. The whole route squashed into one strip, with a tick for you, a tick for the sweep, and the fence across the top. Not knowing what is ahead is the game; not knowing how much is ahead would just be a cabinet that will not tell you the score.
• The road is timing. Every vehicle reads by its lights: the lit end is the end coming at you, and the spill in front of it is how much road it has already claimed. Rows run opposite ways and each one has its own speed, so a band is never four copies of the same problem. However fast a lane gets, its gaps stay open long enough to hop in and out of — speeding a lane up makes it sparser, which is what a motorway looks like anyway.
• The water has no floor. Logs, pallets, drums and reed rafts are the only thing to stand on, they carry you at their own speed, and being carried off the side of the board is the same as never having got on. From route two the middle of a water band goes under — the floats ripple wide and pale for a second before they do — and the rows touching solid ground never do.
• Five things to pick up, and they are why you would ever leave the straight line. Quick feet takes the hop down to seventy milliseconds for six seconds, which is the thing that actually outruns the sweep. Waders make water count as ground for six. Lights out kills every beam, blinds every crosshair and halves the sweep for five and a half — it is optics it takes away, so the guards and their dogs keep walking. A way back keeps until it is spent: the next thing that would turn you back does not. And a jug refills what you are carrying and pays thirty metres.
• The jug is a second clock and it refills. It holds a bit over half of what the sweep gives you, which means a crossing with no refill on it is a crossing you have to walk straight up. Running it dry turns you back, and whatever is left in it when you reach the fence pays up to forty metres.
• Lights sweep the verges from route two, more of them the deeper you get, and never on the row under the fence. Standing in one fills the ring around you; step out and it drains. Full and you are turned back. Walk through a beam, never wait in one.
• Razor wire and fence panels from route two. They simply refuse the hop — no water, no night, nothing but the seconds it takes to go round, which on this cabinet is the expensive part. The two outside columns of the board are never wired, no coil is wider than two columns, and no two wired rows ever touch, so the way past any of it is at most two sidesteps.
• Foot patrols from route three, with a dog from route six. A guard walks a row with a torch out in front, stops at the end of every beat and stands there, and walking into one ends the attempt. The dog is the dangerous half: it casts about on its lead, and if you are on its row and near enough it leans at you — visibly, over most of a second, with the lead going taut — and its reach goes out half again. You get the warning. You have to be looking at the row to use it.
• A crosshair from route five, and two of them from fourteen. It works its way across the map towards you and holds, and it only fills while you are standing still — not mid-hop, not while a float is carrying you, not while the lights are out. Move and it does not drain, it starts again from nothing. You can still stand and read a lane; shuffle one square while you do it and the hold is worth nothing. Nothing outruns it because nothing has to: a single hop covers more ground in a fifth of a second than it does.
• Some of the five fence positions are gaps and the rest are fence. Three of them early, two from route six, and which is which is part of the map — when the fence is off the top of the glass, chevrons along the top edge say where they are. Walking into plain fence bounces you back and costs a mouthful of water; it does not cost the attempt.
• Somebody is out there on their own from route two. Step onto their float and they come across with you, one step behind, for a hundred and fifty metres at the fence. Losing an attempt loses them too, along with everything else you were carrying.
• Three nights, and a spare for every eighth route finished, up to five in hand. Losing one puts the same person back at the bottom of the same route with a full jug and the pick-ups laid out again; losing the last ends the run.
• Bring your own record. Ten on the shelf under the cabinet, or the house tune — four phonk loops, one per terrain, written in the same oscillators every other noise on this floor comes out of. `M` or the speaker in the status bar mutes the lot and the cabinet remembers which you chose.

What the score is#

Metres. A row is twelve of them, so a fourteen-row route is 156 metres a crossing and a forty-four-row one is 516 — the deep routes pay more because they are more, without a bonus having to say so. Finishing one pays fifty times the route number on top, plus what is left in the jug and whatever you brought with you.

Rows are only ever paid once per attempt, and only above the furthest you have already been — walking back down and up again is worth nothing. That one rule is the whole reason the bottom of a route is not an infinite metre press.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when the last night goes; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. Either way the game is the same game — the board is the only thing sign-in changes. The arcade page has the longer version of how that works, and the other cabinets.